Skybox Cloud Edition: Fireside chat with Chief Product Officer Haggai Polak

What new products are you announcing with this launch?

Haggai Polak — With this launch, we are announcing the General Availability of Network Assurance Cloud Edition, Firewall Assurance Cloud Edition, and Vulnerability Control Cloud Edition modules. We are making our award-winning Security Posture Management platform available to customers in a SaaS deployment model to shift much of the operational burden to Skybox. The solution has been available as Beta and Limited Availability for almost a year now, and we are proud of the outstanding reliability and availability we’ve been able to achieve.

Learn more about Skybox Cloud Edition:

What’s unique about Skybox Cloud Edition? Why should customers care?

H.P. — We are the first company to release a SaaS solution for managing security policy in both on-prem and cloud (hybrid) multi-vendor environments. Our customers operate these complex tech stacks, and they clearly articulated the need for a modern SaaS solution that can cater to both on-premises and cloud environments. According to the CIO of an early adopter customer: “It would have been a very myopic decision to invest in a legacy on-prem SPM product when we plan to move 90% of our applications to SaaS in the next three years.”

That’s interesting. What problems in the hybrid environment are you solving with the Skybox Cloud Edition?

H.P. — I would say that attack surface visibility is the starting point for most of our customers. “Help me visualize this complex attack surface from routers and firewalls to IoT and OT assets, VPCs/VNets, and everything in between.” Compliance is another key theme. “Can I demonstrate continuous compliance with regulatory frameworks? Where are my control gaps? Are my cloud and on-premises firewall policies correctly optimized?” The third theme is threat and exposure management. “Is my environment properly segmented to stop the lateral movement of threats? Can I shut down a 3rd party supplier quickly if I suspect a breach? Do I have a risk-based approach to managing exposures? Can you help me ingest and prioritize vulnerabilities from my cloud environments?” These are some of the top challenges for companies in their cloud adoption journeys that Skybox addresses. Risk-based vulnerability management has been top-of-mind for organizations ever since it was codified in the CSA Cloud Control Matrix.

What responsibilities are you taking on with Skybox Cloud Edition?

H.P. — The service eliminates the customer’s responsibility to supply the hardware or VM and OS for the server software. We offload many operational tasks such as software upgrades and on the server side, software installation, hardware, VM and OS maintenance, service health monitoring, and security. The service includes a 24×7 NOC and SOC.

What kind of outcomes can customers expect from adopting Skybox?

H.P. — Ultimately, we are surgically focused on reducing risk for large enterprises, be that compliance gaps, audit failure, cyber-attacks, data breaches, etc. Customers put a high premium on these capabilities because of the catastrophic brand impact of high-profile breaches.

See how you can increase cybersecurity budget ROI with Skybox Security:

Does this mean you will be announcing end-of-sale of the on-prem software and hardware?

H.P. — We currently have no plans to announce end-of-sale for the on-prem software licenses. When it comes to both Security Posture Management and Vulnerability Prioritization, Skybox now offers the most flexible deployment choices:

• Install on-prem on customer-provided or Skybox-provided hardware.
• Install on customer-provided IaaS VMs.
• Now, deploy as SaaS as well.